Wednesday, January 30, 2013

The Dishonest and Dishonorable

“Power isn’t just an abstraction:
It has possessors, supplicants, and hand servants. It can bought and
sold with money, integrity, favors and sacrificial blood — usually
not one’s own...

For those who chose to be on the other
side of activism — or for those who didn’t have a choice because
of birth or circumstance — watch out, because Power has
“prosecutorial discretion.”

You can file all the petitions you like
with the powers that be. You can try to make Power –whether in the
form of wiretapping without warrants or violating international
conventions against torture — follow its own laws. But Power is, as
you might suspect, on the side of Power. Which is to say, Power never
pleads guilty.”

You do not change Empire by cozying up
to it and becoming bedfellows. That just makes you an extension of
Empire, and its vehicle by proxy.

Occasionally, I run across folks who
want to regenerate neo-Paganism that is, in fact, an extension of
Empire and the State religions that ended up fucking over polytheism.
By being complicit with the Empire, they were subject to the flows of
Empire. And when the decline arrived?

They drowned, as they were warned, in a
flood of barbarism that culminated in the destruction of the
Sibylline Oracles, the gradual (though initially factitious – see
Arian Christianity versus early Catholic Christianity) enshrinement
of Christianity as the new State Religion, and the collapse of the
mystery cults.

In the end, the “Foederati
Barbarians” that destroyed the Sibylline Oracles and sacked Rome
ended up seeming more heroic than the violently racist, completely
broken Roman Empire.

Because, in a very real way, they
always had been. Juvenal comes to mind:

On that note, The Dishonest and
Dishonourable (which immediately
follows) also comes to mind.

Note: Stilicho, the Foederati warleader that initially stopped Alaric I, was accused of ordering the destruction of the Sibylline Books. However, there is no proof that he was the one that did it. In Romans and Barbarians (whose author's name escapes me at the moment, and isn't near by to take a look at), the author supposes he was motivated by the rabid Anti-Barbarian sentiments of the Roman Senate. She added that the Sibylline Books warned that the decline of Rome would culminate with Barbarians becoming King-Makers, and by this time in history they more or less were. The Foederati were both created to maintain order in the fractitious Empire, but the Senate pretty consistently fucked them over and drove them to defection. Following Stilicho's death around 407 CE, I think, Alaric finally succeeded in sacking Rome itself. Although Alaric's ambitions were finally thwarted by another Visigoth Warlord, and tribal enemy, Sarus.

The anti-barbarian sentiment is preciously what I mean by 'violently racist.' (Hell, even Juvenal shows more than a bit of it.) But getting back to brass tacks: Empire has been the number one failure of the last 5000 years, with the desire to establish order across vast tracts of land regardless of who lives there, and the establishment of laws that favor the powerful over the people.